Page 11 Advertisements Column 2

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 107, 6 May 1916, Page 11

NO BLOOD E.UST, EXCEPT ! In "The Soul of the War," Mr. Philip Gibbs pictures the soldiers of France '.' who, in the mass, have no blood lust, and hate butchering their fellow-beings." But exception must be made of " their moments of mad excitement, made up of fear as well as of rage, when 'to the shout of ' En avant!' they leap out of the trenches and charge a body of Germans, stabbing and slashing with their bayonets, clubbing men to death with the butt-ends of their rifles, and for a few minutes of devilish intoxication, with the smell of blood in their nostrils, and with blood-shot eyes, rejoicing in slaughter. ' We did not listen to the cries of surrender or to the beseeching plaints of the wounded,' said a French soldier, describing one of these scenes. 'We had no use for prisoners, and on both sides there was no quarter given in this Argonne wood. Better than fixed bayonets was an unfixed bayonet grasped as a dagger. Better than any bayonet was a bit of iron or a broken gun-stock, or a sharp knife. In the hand-to-hand fighting there was no shooting, but only the struggling of interlaced bodies, with fists and claws grabbing for each other's throats. I saw men. use teeth and bite their enemy to death with their jaws, gnawing at their windpipes. This is modern war in the SOth century —or one scene in it—and it is only afterwards, if one escapes with life, that one is stricken with the thought of all that horror which has debased us as low as the beasts—lower than beasts, because we have..an intelligence and a soul to teach us better things.' " For Children's Hacking Cough, Woods' Great Peppermint Cure.—Adtt. ,